Plants suffering from erectile dysfunction? Here’s Viagra for orchids!
What do you do when your orchid leaves are flaccid, limp, and just not performing? How do you get those erect, stiff leaves full of turgor and vigor?
On many occasions I’ve acquired plants or somehow ended up with plants that have a central leaf that just won’t stand at full attention. I had one particularly large P. rothschildianum ‘Green Valley’ x ‘Fly Eagle’ with lovely thick, wide leaves. The plant grew well, but at one point the big central leaf just flopped over. Watering more frequently just didn’t seem to help, despite a pot full of healthy roots (1).
Having grown under lights like the pot growers, I had already experimented with every possible humidifying system you might come across:
Ultrasonic humidifiers: These are usually cheaply built, with an ultrasonic element that breaks quickly.
Ultrasonic misters: These are the ultrasonic piezos from the above humidifiers, and they have identical shortcomings. You can get them in arrays or six elements that can pump put a copious amount of fine fog, but they require a lot of power, and the power supplies are very low quality. One of them almost started an electrical fire in my home as I was testing it.
Warm steam humidifier: these have the advantage of warming your plant area, but by the same token, they have the problem of warming your plants when you want it to be cool. Good for use in the winter if you want to keep plants warm and provide humidity.
Gravel trays: Heh… I’m somewhat unconvinced that these work. Here’s why: When molecules of water evaporate from the surface area of the gravel, they will disperse into the overwhelmingly greater volume of air that is not already humidified. Hence, the amount of actual humidified air around your plants is quite low especially if your room is large compared to the size of your gravel tray. How much actually reaches your plants and has an effect is questionable. If your plants are sitting in water in a gravel tray and thriving, I wouldn’t exactly assign the success of said growth to the gravel trays, but to semihydroponic growth (and a plant that has adjusted well to it). Nevertheless, if gravel trays work for you, keep it up.
Cooling misters: These are the plastic tubes with fine nozzles that you get at Home Depot and hook up to a garden hose spigot. They claim to produce a mist that can reduce the ambient temp by something like twenty degrees (which only works if you’re in the hot desert and dropping 20 degrees gets you down to a balmy 90 deg F). The problem is that the mist produced is not as fine as you might think, and actually ends up splattering droplets all over your leaves coalesce into big drops that then run into the crown of your plants, forming a lovely cesspool for erwinia and other pathogens to grow and infect your plant.
So, what is going to get those limp leaves up?
I use, and love, The Hydrofogger (2). This thing pumps out a super fine, atomized mist like nothing I have ever seen. It works on a different principle than any of the above. A centrifugal mechanism inside throws water out onto some other thingamajig that results in the finest, loveliest, most ethereal angel mist you can imagine.
If you can use one of these babies in an enclosed space like a small 15′ x 15′ greenhouse and jack it up to full capacity, you will have an area completely packed with fog. I’ve gotten the fog so thick that I literally could not see more than a few inches in front of my face.
So how did my limp roth do? Well, I subjected it to a few days of 90%+ relative humidity, and that limp leaf just rose and became erect as if I had fed the plant a bottle of Viagra (not that I have any personal experience or need of such pharmaceuticals).
Other plants that didn’t have limp leaf problems also seemed much happier, too.
Please keep in mind that the other part of this equation is having an enclosed space that can hold the humidity at the required level. (So if you’re growing on a patio, you may want to try hang some plastic sheeting around your plants to keep the humidity high) Venting the humidity from time to time, and keeping strong air movement flowing over your plants will help to prevent other opportunistic pathogens from getting a foothold.
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(1) So why doesn’t simply watering the plant more work better? There is probably a limit to the amount of water that can be pumped through a plant’s vasculature system from the roots. Increasing the availability of water in the air allows the molecules of water to be absorbed through the leaves and possibly reach areas not reached as efficiently by the plant’s vasculature.
(2) Call the Hydrofogger phone number at 1-866-77-HUMID, and ask to speak with Mr. Thomas. He will take good care of you. Full Disclosure: I was so pleased with the results, I told Mr. Thomas I’d mention Hydrofogger on this blog, and he kindly agreed to give me a commission on any sales originating from my referral. I’d like to pass on the generosity — if you get a Hydrofogger, you can receive $25 off of your next order with us at Paphiness Orchids.
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